326 WINTERING AND SPRING DWINDLING, 
CHAPTER XIII 
WINTERING anD Sprinc Dwinp.ine. 
Wintering. 
619. Bees can be wintered safely in nearly all climates, 
where the Summer is long enough to enable them to store a 
Winter supply. In the natural state, the vital heat of the 
live hollow trees in which they dwell, helps to maintain a 
higher temperature than that of the outside air, and bees 
Winter so well in such abodes, that travelers, who visit 
Northern Russia, wonder how so small an insect can live in 
such inhospitable countries. 
620. As s.onas frosty weather arrives, bees cluster com- 
pactly together in their hives, to keep warm. They do not 
assemble on combs full of honey, but on the empty comb 
just below the honey. ‘They are never dormant, like wasps 
and hornets, and a thermometer pusied up among them 
will show aSummer temperature, even when, in the open air, 
it is many degrees below zero. 
The bees in the cluster are imbricated, like the shingles of 
a roof, each bee having her head under the abdomen of the 
one above her, and so on, to the ones who are in reach of 
the honey. These pass the honey to those below them, 
which pass it to the next, and so on, to the bottom of the 
mass. 
621. When the cold becomes intense, they keep up an 
incessant tremulous motion, in order to develop more heat* 
© Everybody knows that motion transforms itself into heat, and that heat is 
but aform of motion. . . . whether the motion comes from a large body 
or from asmall one, whether this motion be suddenly or gradually stopped, 
the result is the same, it is transformed into heat.i—(Flammarion, ‘‘Le Monde 
Avant la Création de 1’ Ilomme.’’) 
